Don's Tuesday Column

           THE WAY I SEE IT   by Don Polson  Red Bluff Daily News   6/09/2020

The riots to reelect Trump campaign

The election—regardless of the changes in Democrat nominees over the last 6 months, the nearly-unprecedented arrival of a pandemic in an election year, and civil unrest not seen in over a quarter century—remains President Trump’s to lose.

That’s how it looked in January before the Wu-flu hit; in March and April as the political, media and medical establishment convinced Trump et al to jam top-down mandates restricting every aspect of our personal and economic lives; and over the last two weeks of protest/violent protest/rioting/arson/looting/insurrection over “police brutality” and “racial injustice.”

While poll after poll shows Trump losing to Biden—lacking admission of massive polling failure in 2016 or the irrelevance of polling months before the election—some on Trump’s side may get anxious, which is better than smug and cocky. Many partisan Trump-haters on the Democrat-progressive left take neither heart nor hope for those same reasons; they pray (chant, hug trees, consult psychics) that America’s voters wake up to the evident (to them) threat of Trump’s reelection.

Both sides should note that the “internals” (if the pollsters trust the data to our analysis) invariably show an “oversampling” of Democrats by upwards of 30 percent over Republicans, meaning that if you reverse the imbalance you reverse the result. They never duplicate the Dem/Rep ratio that voted in 2016, nor do they ask who their 1,000 to 1,500 Americans voted for.

If they can’t reproduce the results of the last election, how can we believe their reliability going forward 5 months? You can trust that most current polling is, by design, showing an artificial Biden lead. Polls showing so-called “swing state” leads for Trump are likely right; Trump’s job approval is as good as Obama/Bush/Clinton’s was at this point. Voters give Trump higher marks on the economy.

Rasmussen found Trump’s support among African-Americans at 41 percent; if Trump gets half that percent in the election, he will win many current likely Democrat states.

On perhaps the most controversial issue to get polled lately—a virtual Rorschach test of views on the unrest—see “Big Majority Supports Using Military Against Rioters” (Mark Tapscott, June 3). “The latest Morning Consult survey finds 58 percent of respondents support using the military to help law enforcement end rioting and looting sparked by Antifa and other anarchist groups in the wake of George Floyd’s horrendous May 25 murder.”

That 2 to 1 support for using the military becomes 71% to 18% in favor of using the national guard to help the police. Democrats can poll themselves but they must admit how out of touch they are with voters on that issue. Then consider how far one-sided news media and their anti-Trump interviewees are from that overwhelming voter sentiment (i.e. Gens. Powell, Kelly, Mattis). I am cautious over the deployment of Nat’l Guard and military only due to the predictable manipulation by violent leftists for the sick goal of getting some innocent protester killed when soldiers become threatened (see Kent State).

Support for the police was likewise heavily in favor vs. opposed. So, it’s unsurprising that when Democrats—in the same lemming-like fashion they displayed over radically leftist “Green New Deal” or “Medicare For All” ideas—glom onto “Defund the Police,” it is not a consequence-free proposal. It’s as lunatic an idea as has ever been floated; to date, not one elected Democrat has condemned the most crackpot, anti-law enforcement proposal to come out of the anti-cop, pro-criminal left.

If the protests and demonstrations had, in fact, remained peacefully confined to the only location actually affected by George Floyd’s death, and it’s police—Minneapolis, Minnesota—there would have never been the rioting, arson, looting and murders of half a dozen Law Enforcement Officers (LEOs), let alone a dozen or so civilians. It’s on the anarchist, Antifa hooligans and insurrectionists for unleashing their well-honed instigation, destruction and “destroy-your-enemy” direct action and mayhem.

That local, regrettable murder—an aberration for LEOs within that city—became a national cause for tens of thousands of peaceful, concerned citizens of all races. Then came the after-dark unleashing, from among the marchers, of the thousands of “black block,” black clothed, unidentifiable instigators of mayhem: Antifa, trained with classes, charts and practiced instruction to fade in and out while breaking windows, burning cars and buildings, and hurling deadly weapons at cops, hoping for return force.

Look up “Project Veritas Infiltrates Antifa, Reveals Organized Training in Violent Action,” by Petr Svab; “Antifa stokes the vote for Trump,” by Hugo Gurdon; “Resistance Has Become Insurrection,” by Michael Walsh; “Trump is right: Antifa is a terrorist group. It always was,” by Washington Examiner; and “Rioters for Trump?” by S. Hayward.

Some more documented food for thought: When I wrote that it’s likely more LEOs are killed by black men than the other way around, I hadn’t found the data. It turns out that between 50 and 70 LEOs are killed each year and about 40 percent are killed by black criminals (ucr.fbi.gov, “FBI—Table 21”; also, “Officer characteristics and racial disparities in fatal officer-involved shootings,” pnas.org).

Even the Huffington Post found that, in 2016, out of 250 black people killed by police, only “Thirty-nine of these people were unarmed.” Heather Mac Donald wrote, “There Is No Epidemic of Racist Police Shootings,” citing the “Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences,” that “white officers are no more likely than black or Hispanic officers to shoot black civilians…In fact, if there is a bias in police shootings after crime rates are taken into account, it is against white civilians.”

Heather MacDonald also reported that the Washington Post found that 9 unarmed black men were killed by police last year. Quite the disparity from the hysterical themes from Black Lives Matter types.